The solar system could be much “hairier” than we thought. According to a recent NASA study, our planet could be surrounded by long strands or hairs of dark matter that may help us understand the fundamentals of this elusive and abundant component of the universe.
As we know, until now neither dark matter nor dark energy have been directly detected, but scientists are constantly trying to unravel this mystery. Thus, Gary Prézeau, a physicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California (USA), carried out a series of computer simulations to find out how dark matter interacts when it approaches the Earth .
Taking into account earlier calculations that dark matter forms a kind of fine-grained stream of particles that crosses our galactic neighborhood, Prézeau’s simulations revealed that when a stream of dark matter passed through a planet, it current becomes an ultra-dense filament or “hair” of dark matter , so on Earth it should be no different and would be surrounded by hair sprouting from it, curving this current into a narrow and ultra-dense filament.
These filaments have two “roots”, first where the densest concentrations of dark matter particles meet and then at the “tips”; When particles pass through the Earth’s core, the density of the particles is about 1 billion times greater than average and they could be a million kilometers away from the Earth’s surface.
“If we could identify the location of the root of the filaments, we could potentially send a probe there and get a lot of data on dark matter ,” says Prézeau.
The study has been published in The Astrophysical Journal .
